Clowns At Midnight (15 page)

‘Please. And photograph it, if I may.’

We went into the living room. The curtains were open, the blinds raised, and the rich summer light made the terracotta glow like honey, like amber or new bread.

‘Not too fierce today?’ Carlo asked.

‘Not too fierce, no. Full of mirth, if anything.’

I took four shots of it with my digital camera, three of them close-ups that would suit my TT needs very well. I managed it without reaching quarter-clown and it brought an end to our time together.

‘Thanks for everything, Carlo,’ I said.

‘Everything?’

‘It’s a wonderful maze. I’d very much like to see it again.’

‘Then you will. But next time slowly, eh?’

‘Carefully, yes.’

He saw me out to the car and shook my hand warmly. ‘Your piece on the Commedia is an important thing, David. A good start. I hope you will show me more.’

‘Of course. But, please, you must comment—as someone who is a student of lost knowledge.’

He inclined his head, smiling. ‘
Sì
,
grazie
! I count it a privilege.’

He waved me off, smiling and waving until I was out of sight. As I turned onto Edenville Road, I became more and more convinced that his spiel had been no accidental thing. Nor had it been the result of my comments about the Commedia. It had seemed unstructured, spontaneous enough, but there was also the sense that he had been hinting at things he didn’t want to state directly. I felt both intrigued and exasperated. What had he been trying to tell me? Why had he played it down, dismissed it as the ravings of an enthusiast?

Nor did I believe for a minute that the maze had already been there. I just couldn’t accept that a—what did he call it, a
maison de dédale
?—had been built amid these hills, not out here in the country, not in Australia in the thirties or forties. True, Norman Lindsay had built his transplanted classical domain in the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney, but he was an accepted artist, a well-known figure, someone in the public eye. The idea of a secret place like Carlo’s seemed so improbable.

But I was a city boy being introduced to the realities of country life. I didn’t have enough knowledge of such things. Perhaps it happened everywhere, and there were quirky features in every other outback town just waiting to be found. An orrery at Orroru, for instance, or a crusader castle at Templers. Perhaps the name Springwood led Norman Lindsay to choose the locale for his own re-creation of Elysia; perhaps Edenville had worked its magic on whoever had preceded the Risis.

But it didn’t feel right. I was certain that Carlo, or Carlo’s father, had built this place, that there was more to it than I’d been given.

At home again, I spent two hours doing chores then phoned my parents, making myself sound easy and at peace, giving reassurances, knowing they would be passed on to my sister and Julia in turn. That done, I felt restless, aimless, probably inevitable with all that had happened.

I decided to lose myself in my writing. Carlo had liked the rough of my article; there was that to be done. And Rollo Jaine was still waiting for me in the library in Trieste where I’d left him. I brewed some coffee, made some bruschetta to have as a snack later, then set up my laptop at the kitchen table, deciding to allow myself the view of the hill as I helped Rollo on his way.

I did well considering, but as the afternoon waned found myself increasingly distracted by the view through the kitchen window.

Down in Sydney, through late spring and early summer days filled with haze and the purple-blue wash of jacaranda blooms, during evenings filled with lingering sunsets and the heady scent of jasmine, wisteria and freshly mown grass, you can always hear the drone of cicadas. Behind the day, behind the twilight, it’s vividly there the moment you listen for it, releasing itself from the white noise of what summer is.

The parks and bushland reserves of Australia’s largest city are filled with variants of
Cyclochila australasia
, locally known as Green Grocers, Double Drummers, Yellow Mondays, Floury Bakers, Cherry Noses and Black Princes, and, when temperatures climb above 18°C, their song reaches a deafening 120 decibels, very near the average human’s pain threshold.

But, to my surprise, here at Starbreak Fell such cicada song existed as a distant and attenuated thing, too often seeming to be on another hill or in another part of the forest from where I was, like something moving away. Certainly there was a rogue or two droning close by during the lazy afternoons, and now and then I came upon their shells clinging to the trunks of trees, abandoned chambers of honey-coloured light. But mostly it was crickets and bees that I heard on walks up into the forest. Mostly it was silence stitched over with the zip or burr of a dragonfly or Christmas beetle, marred by the sudden flurry of squabbling birds, though this, too, was usually a hushed thing and quickly ended.

I don’t know why that silence troubled me. Sitting at the kitchen table, looking out at the trees, I put it down to the heat, to being in a new house and hearing the Yakkos cries, to finding the tower—the
nuraghe
—and the bottle-trees, the new TT images.

But at another level, it seemed like something those things were distracting me from.

Perhaps it was just the landscape itself. The Australian bush in summer is rarely threatening. There are some venomous snakes and spiders, certainly, but no natural predators for humankind. But it can be unsettling. Without that constant wall of cicada song, without the twittering and burble of birds because of the heat, there is an uncanny quality. Ask anyone who has experienced it. Out on the open flatlands it rarely bothers you: it is part of the vastness of everything. But on a hilltop like this, pulled back from that wide bright expanse into close-fitted corridors of tree shadow, there is a compression. The silence fills something with itself, is no longer the containing vessel but the thing contained.

I smiled at how fixated I had become. Part of my condition was a degree of hyperaesthesia, an acute sensitivity of focus. Now, with nothing better to seize on, I was being oversensitive to
whatever
there was.

But that wasn’t fair. This wasn’t just because of the tower and the bottle-trees or a flower garland draped over a Scarecrow Cross. This wasn’t something unique to the Australian experience. You found it in the gloom of a Berkshire forest, surely, or looking up at the cliff-line from a beach on the rocky coast of a Greek island like Skyros. You found it in the great gulfs of light enclosing mesas on the Colorado Plateau or by an overgrown pool in the dim green light at the back of an old garden.

It’s important when something as natural as silence is seen as unnatural. It’s the quiet that comes with the predator, with the watcher, the silence of something holding you in its line of sight, considering you as prey. It usually means something atavistic and primal has been triggered. We remember it deep in our genome, so it registers as preternatural and uncanny, even supernatural—as an urgent and eloquent message: beware now! Whatever this is is for you!

It was like that for me with the hill, some kind of recognition.

I needed a break, more coffee. It was almost six o’clock; the bruschetta would make an early supper. I was setting it out when I glanced out the kitchen window.

Someone was standing at the edge of the forest.

CHAPTER 10

Over the terrace embankment, up beyond the bonsai garden and the gumtrees that shaded the back of the house, someone stood in late sunshine in the low grass where the bush ended.

I scarcely believed it—a misshapen dark form just standing there.

I blinked to clear my vision, expecting at any moment for it to resolve into an old burnt-out tree-trunk, broken and blackened by a bushfire in other years. That was what it had to be, something served up in the oversaturated light-field of a hot summer day. One old stump had focused differently, that was all, was registering with the intensity of something else.

It was still there. An unmoving human figure stood in grass and low scrub thirty metres up the slope and on the other side of the cattle fence, someone strange, grotesque-looking, watching the house.

It was full-clown for me, of course. Not quarter, not half. I stood paralysed at the kitchen window, heart thundering, blood hammering at the temples, breathing ragged, all the while working to grasp what I was seeing. Panic had turned me to stone.

Almost. For creature of habit, I instinctively went to my ‘scream saver’ routines, to the Jack-mantras, talk-downs and Jack-options. I tried to work
with
the terror again.

Hallucination, I told myself, running down the menu. Had to be. Projected fear, entoptic trickery from an overactive mind and too much glare, too much errant light, the play of phosphenes delivering the quite literal phantasm of a day-ghost. I’d been working on the article over the past few days, caught up with the details of the Commedia. It had to happen. It was as if some part of me, some traitorous part, even carolled: At last!

Someone else would have shifted position, stepped to the side, resolved the trickery and laughed at what it really was. I couldn’t do that. I was wired, locked hard, as frozen as the figure at the forest’s edge. All I could do was shut my eyes or—the most important option—fix it in memory, log the trick of it, snatch anything I could to give Jack later.

It took an instant and forever, both, to render it.

A striking, dramatic shape was standing against the tall gums and newer plantings, standing heavily, legs firmly apart, possibly with hands on hips—akimbo, that was the word!—as if weighed down, beaten somehow, but at the same time resolute, determined. A severe black face (if face it was, if person it was!) concealed by something (a mask with a hood or kerchief?) with a sheen to it, as if wet or lacquered. Shoulders hunched or padded, definitely humped up, possibly deformed by what it wore. And all of it dark, dark, too dark for a hot summer’s day, a darkness like, yes, exactly like, the deep utter black inside a burnt-out stump.

The blackness of a new image on a computer screen!

I had all that in moments, staring, aching, limbs turned to stone, to iron etched by acid, lungs crushed and leaden with the effort of breathing.

But breathing, managing.

Had to happen, had to happen! I’m not alone!

The Jack-mantras helped. We had run hypotheticals, agreed on strategies, on—lovely term—coping mechanisms.

Don’t deny, don’t avoid
.
Stay with it
.
Let it be real
.
Know it
.
The moment is yours!

And, through it all, I still expected my spectre to resolve into Old Burnt Trunk. Or I would blink one more time and it would be gone. Or I would fall to the floor in a syncope faint, then get up and find the figure gone and the world restored to order.

If I
could
fall. If I
could
just look away.

What happened was far worse.

The figure turned and moved back into the forest.

After five, ten, minutes, however long it had been, the grotesque form simply swung about in a quick flurry of black, tan and odd brassy glints, showed its deformed, hunched shoulders and strangely crusted back, and vanished into the scrub.

‘No! No!’ I cried, barely knowing I had.

But gone, too, were the easy cop-outs: the solace of fancy and hallucination. I had
seen
grass bend, bushes pushed aside, branches springing back.

And that was my liberation.

Someone had put on clothes and a mask and set out to give me a fright. Someone—the same one who had set up the bottle-trees and called Yakkos in the night—had paid me a visit, had deliberately stood in cruel summer heat to play at being a stranger. The bogeyman.

Not Jack’s doing. Not some new and extraordinary Jack therapy sprung on me. He wouldn’t—
couldn’t
—do something like this. Images, yes, but not this.

Whoever was dressing up, this figment, phantom, ‘phigment’ (the madcap coining was there!), had probably left the images on my TT disks as well and, even more alarming,
was able to do such a thing!

But everything was different. You could hold a grudge with a human, settle a score, tear away a mask.

Finally, finally, I loosened, fell back against the wall, managed to get to a chair and collapse at the kitchen table. I let my head drop forward onto my arms and buried myself in darkness, the way children do.

Then I pushed back, suddenly terrified that the black figure would be there at the window, staring in. Isn’t that how it went in horror movies? The quick cheap scare?

But there was nothing, just a vivid piece of sky above the trees, the deserted forest-line, the familiar sunny slope. The afternoon light was shadowing now, the intensity falling away. It was beautiful and, like so many beautiful things, it had something dark and spoiled hidden away inside it.

I worked at that too, rallying, Jack-and-David powerful, Jack-and-David resolute. That dark figure would be labouring, sweating under all that gear, would have pulled off the mask as soon as it could, shucked off the padded clothing, would now be hurrying down to a parked car, dumping the costume in the back. Job done. Driving off to—where?

The Risi place? I thought of it immediately. Simplistically, in the absence of knowing other names, other people, that was the name I had. The Risi place or on his way to a pub.
Gave that writer bloke a good scare!

And there was still time. I locked the back door and hurried to the car, lost precious seconds fumbling with the keys, my hands shaking, a pressure building behind my eyes.

Soon I had the car turned around, the power fence disconnected, and was heading over the southern flank of the hill.

There was no sign of a car on Edenville Road, nothing down by the gate, nothing on the road itself. It had to be further along, already out of sight behind the line of trees where the northern side of the hill met the road. I fumbled with the latch of the gate, but was soon back behind the wheel and driving north.

I needed to see a car, even if impossibly far in the distance, just a cloud of dust. No car meant whoever it was had stayed, was still there, or was leaving on foot—that was it! Walking to the Risis’.

Or hadn’t existed!

But I refused to accept that. The bushes had been pushed aside!

I floored the accelerator, went plunging around the curves. There was nothing, nothing, just the fences and swaying stands of Rhodes grass and setaria, the emptiness and the silence, the far-off houses, the hills beyond.

I pulled over, frantic, feeling a rage that went beyond the circumstances, a floodgate pulled free on terror. I raged against my condition, at being so trapped, at all the times reason hadn’t been able to encompass the demons.

The anger went out into the day, into the oblivious fields and hills, into the uncaring sky and hot golden light. It left me exhausted at the wheel, sitting drained and shaking, but it went away, and was purged. Again.

I was left to sort facts, to deal with the simple truth of what had happened. A figment? No. Something
seen
. Something
real
. Like the bits of glass where the bottle-trees had stood, like confirming the tower and the cross.

Confirming the tower. That’s what I’d do. Keep the tower real. Keep it part of this.

Returning to Starbreak Fell, I drove up the hill and stopped close to where I had two days before when I’d chanced upon Raina’s picnic. I had dealt with Madame Sew then; I was dealing with a spectre from the forest now.

It was like a continuation of that magical time of Tuesday. Again there was the late sunlight, the lengthening shadows, the scent of wildflowers, resins and eucalypt oils, though with a new hard nugget of fear.

I hurried up the slope, swishing at the grass with a stick, and was soon in tree-shadow again, though thankfully the late sun penetrated deeply on this southwestern side. I half-expected to glance round and see the dark figure standing there, blackened and sinister, watching from higher up the slope or from off to the side. Every burnt-out trunk reminded me of him now, to the point where I concentrated on the slope ahead, swishing at the bracken, determined not to look anywhere but in front. If my visitor were watching, I would spoil the intended effect. Only the tower mattered.

And there it was, looming through the last of the trees; its hard reality so welcome.

I hurried to it and pressed my hands to the rough stones. It was almost a joyous act, and it cautioned me. It had all been
too
easy,
too
effortless. Was I being primed for a new scare?

I stood and listened. Rounding the tower on Tuesday I’d found the flowers and the gumnut sprig. Now the cross might not be so kind. Now the door might be open, the masked figure waiting.

Returning to the car was out of the question. I had to do this. But instead of going right and following the curve of the tower around to the door that way, I turned left and proceeded clockwise. This way I wouldn’t be blindsided. I’d approach from the west and see the cross and the door with no obstructions. Any surprises would be at more of a distance.

Running my hand on the warm granite, I started my circuit, finally stepped into the clearing.

And went to full-clown in an instant.

I fell back against the stone, my hands covering my eyes. It was a child’s reaction, a true phobic reaction, obliterating the nightmare in the simplest, quickest way. But then I immediately peered between my fingers, like a child peeking at a horror movie. I couldn’t help myself.

There was no figure outside the door, but the cross had been decorated again. Draped over the short transverse bar was the black covering the figure had worn: black fur, a fleece it looked like, most of it falling down the back of the cross, with a huge swelling of coppery pots? gourds? something, attached to the shoulders and spilling down behind. The head of the creature—a glossy black mask—was fitted over the top of the cross and hooded with a dark kerchief, completing the effect.

It was a grotesque sight, utterly terrifying. I sagged against the stones, hands to my forehead, staring between spread fingers. I couldn’t look away, couldn’t move forward. I was trapped in the loop.

I could barely breathe. My fingers on my temples were like spikes on a drumskin, all pressure and pounding.

But it was
real
; it was
there
! Not a ‘phigment.’ Not the cheat and betrayal of nothing at all. The figure had brought the trappings here and left them.

And gone into the tower!

I had to move forward, had to know. I needed to try the door, examine the dreadful things on the cross. Touch them if I could, take them if I could bear to.

It was
in
the physical world, I told myself. Just like the bottle-trees. Just like the figures calling in the forest. People and things. Just things.

It should have brought relief. It had worked before. Now it was harder. Full-clown had me and wouldn’t let go. My jerking steps forward, edging around the stones, would have been pathetic to see. I imagined Raina and her friends watching, imagined Gemma, all watching, astonished at the awkward, makeshift puppet
I
had become.

Just wool or fur, I told myself, snatching at facts, playing at control. There were people terrified of fur or animal skins. Doraphobia. This was a sheepskin, that’s all, something like that. Just a wooden mask; what it looked like. And those pots or gourds, just metal. Just stuff. Fear of metal: metallophobia.

I knew now that I wouldn’t be able to touch the objects on the cross but if I could just get nearer. I was managing, like a wounded, broken thing, step by leaden step. But no touching, never touching.

It was the mask that did it. This scarecrow would have been difficult with just the sheepskin, but the glossy black mask brought the Commedia demons, hideous Mr Punch, all of them.

Everyone has their bravest moments, solitary glories without the comfort of others, no witnesses at all. I could think of none braver for David Leeton. Madame Sew had been difficult: faceless, headless, grim and terrifying, especially shrouded in her storeroom, but somehow able to be resisted. This was different.

I was five metres from the draped cross and that seemed my limit, one defined by feelings of suffocation and panic, by headache and growing nausea, sweats and blurring vision. I stopped and covered my eyes, steadied myself as best I could. Lyssophobia: fear of becoming mad. Phobophobia: fear of fear itself.

Do it with me
, Jack said in my mind.
Scientifically
.
Clinically
.
You’re in charge
;
you can turn and leave at any time
.
Just bring it down to what it is
.
Tell its parts
.
Get what you can
.

I
chose
to look again.
Chose
. Someone had draped a black sheepskin (dyed? naturally black?) over the back of the cross so parts fell forward over the arms. There were leather straps fastening it at the shoulders, more lower down where a person’s waist would be. A black wooden mask was set on the short upper length of the cross: heavy-browed, stern and scowling, with a high forehead and sunken cheeks, a strong aquiline nose and brooding, deep-set eyes, no doubt pierced in the pupils so the wearer could see. A dark scarf was tied over the top babushka-fashion, holding a flat cap in place, then knotted under the chin.